Chris Kelly: Paying to play shouldn't get you privacy

Under the stuttering strobe of a dying streetlight, a lady of the evening struts her stuff.

A black Jaguar trawls the gutter. Behind the wheel is a wannabe player in a powder blue button-down and a Nautica windbreaker. His stick-figure family smiles on the back windshield. The boy plays football. The girl plays soccer. The dog and cat are probably on less friendly terms in real life.

She hikes up her fishnet stockings and names her price. He asks her to smile and counts her teeth. Nowhere near 32. No way she's an undercover cop. Negotiations begin, but she has all the leverage. He agrees to her terms. Money changes hands, and police swarm the scene.

Both are cuffed and booked. Under the law, a "john" who solicits a prostitute is as guilty as the object of his misguided desire. She was selling, but neither would have been busted if he wasn't buying. Fishnets can't swim without a partner.

Now let's rewrite the scene, substituting a state legislator for the prostitute, and replacing the john with a vendor hot enough for public contracts to pay the going rate. Terms are negotiated, money changes hands, and a no-bid contract is awarded to install a $6 million fog detection system on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Like most mammals, I was born with a fog detection system. I recently upgraded it with bifocals. They cost $450, and I used my own money to buy them. Guess that makes me a sucker.

Former state Senate Democratic Leader Bob Mellow is a crook. That was indelibly established with the plea agreement that earned him a 16-month federal prison sentence for mail fraud and filing a false tax return. He is innocent until proven guilty of the latest charges against him, but a state grand jury presentment released last week paints a lurid (and believable) portrait of Mr. Mellow as a high-profile streetwalker whose fishnets hauled in bribes in exchange for obscene outlays of public money.

He is charged with corrupt organizations, bribery, bid-rigging, conspiracy and related offenses. Attorney General and West Scranton native Kathleen Kane says Mr. Mellow and a handful of turnpike officials conspired to defraud state taxpayers out of millions of dollars. The former senator is learning the same lesson as Gov. Tom Corbett, R-Drillers, Jerry Sandusky, Lottery Giveaway, etc.: You can take the girl out of the West Side, but you can't take the West Side out of the girl.

Mrs. Kane is no girl, of course. She is a steely, self-confident woman, and the first to be elected Pennsylvania attorney general. She has already made history. The Turnpike Commission scandal affords her an opportunity to make some more.

All she has to do is publicly identify and prosecute the vendors she says paid Mr. Mellow and others for business. The grand jury presentment does not name most of these johns, nor does it out other politicians who took campaign contributions that in any other context would be plainly called bribes.

I can look out the newsroom windows with my fog detection system and see PNC Bank's local headquarters. What I can't see is the name of the PNC executive whose alleged gifts to Mr. Mellow supported "a larger pattern of bid-rigging, improper influence and commercial bribery."

You might think PNC would want to come clean, maybe say the executive in question has been disciplined and steps are being taken to avoid such chicanery in the future. Instead, the bank has circled the wagons and declined to comment. Regional President Pete Danchak is suddenly less accessible than Bigfoot.

Mrs. Kane says she lacks the evidence to prove a quid-pro-quo between contractors and politicians other than Mr. Mellow. Fine, but she still knows who paid whom, and how much. If vendors can engage in political prostitution and face no consequences, exactly what will deter them from continuing to pay to play?

And what about the honest vendors who get squeezed out because they play it straight? How can they compete against rivals who see bribery as "the cost of doing business?" Maybe that's why the same names seem to come up whenever we report on public corruption.

The public has a right to know how its money is spent, and whether we are unwittingly supporting individuals and institutions who game the system for fun and profit. We have a right to know if these cheats are sitting next to us in church, on charity boards or in the black Jaguar that just passed us on the turnpike with a pair of fishnets flying from the antenna.

The threat of being exposed is the only real pressure that can be brought to bear on the business community, especially if law enforcement is unwilling to bring charges. There may be legitimate reasons for not charging the vendors Mr. Mellow is accused of shaking down, but nothing prevents Ms. Kane or any other official from naming them.

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